You know where you stand with business-oriented laptops. They're chunky, dull-looking machines with all the pizazz of a rainy afternoon in Chester. Dell's Vostro range has been a case in point: a collection of low-power, low-charisma laptops likely to appeal only to the most frugal of IT department bean counters.
Dell Vostro …

"We couldn't figure a way to get the bottom plate off"

Acer Timeline 8371

I would take a look at the above (or 8471 if you want a DVD drive). Battery life is great, the specs are better and the price is lower. Importantly, it comes with w7 pro - the Dell comes with Home edition which I think excludes it from being classed as a business machine especially when doing comparisons.

Vostro

I went to check on the new Vostro 3000 at Dell. Starting at the base model i changed the OS from win32 to win64 at which point I got a warning telling me that, and I quote, "A 64 Bit Operating System requires a Minimm of 6144MB of Memory." (spelling error is theirs). As if this wasn't bad enough they don't offer that amount of memory on the base model. I used dell chat to try and tell them but I couldn't get them to understand

DVD

i installed Windows 7 on a Presario in 12 minutes the other day, from boot to desktop, using a USB key. Why the hell would I want to use a DVD drive for this purpose. Seriously, optical drives are old hat.

I might at a push, have a Blu-Ray drive in the living room, but I'd rather download it (legally) and, using the money saved not buying the physical item (???), to buy extra storage for the media server.

So...

Presumably Dell will be doing one of their external optical jobbies

which it seems every Dell shop has about a bazillion of kicking about doing nothing. I swear, when humanity's time on this Earth is done, it'll be the insects and the Dell optical drives that take the reigns

mmmm

Mobile Broadband

The V13s sold before end of January did have mobile boradband - like my V13. But it does have problems when the laptop goes into power save modes. Otherwise a great business laptop and it does look expensive :-)

I DO like the look of this...

...and I think they're on to a winner; even the dual core version's really well priced for what you get. Have to say, though, I don't think it's going to do their Adamo sales any favours; perhaps they're worried about machines like the Acre Timelines stealing their lunch money more than that, though.